Councilman Max Anderson generated cheers from the anti-meter crowd of about thirty people who stayed late into the night when he likened PG&E to a hitman, referring to the utility’s $40-plus million support of Proposition 16, a June ballot measure that sought to make it nearly impossible for local governments to jump into the public power market. “If somebody takes a shot at you and misses and then shows up on your doorstep with a care package for you with a suspicious ticking sound coming from it,” Anderson said, “I think you’d be very justified to be extremely suspicious of their intentions.”

Berkeley’s letter to the public utilities commission is one more in a small but growing stack. The commission said it had already received about 2,000 health-related complaints as of June 1, in addition to more than 1,500 non-health-related complaints pouring in from across the state — though most are from Northern California, and are specifically in reference to PG&E.

The commission contracted the Structure Group, headquartered in Houston, to provide an independent evaluation of PG&E’s SmartMeters. However, the evaluation will not look at radio-frequency emissions — only meter accuracy and the company’s billing and operational practices. PG&E is quick to point out that it already paid Richard Tell Associates to conduct a radio-frequency study and found that SmartMeters fall 15,000 times below FCC limits.

But many local activists are suspicious of the utility. “If one wants to believe PG&E, one would be considered naive,” said Lloyd Morgan, a 68-year-old retired electrical engineer and self-made radio-frequency expert. “Would that we had government agencies that actually checked to see if it’s all true.”

However, the precise strength of the powerful “peak pulses” emitted by SmartMeters remains unclear. PG&E refuses to disclose that information, stating only that its calculations are in accordance with FCC specifications.

But how the utility calculates the pulses has become an issue of debate. PG&E’s calculations are time-averaged, or stretched out over all the time the meter’s not pulsing, making the average significantly lower than the peak. In addition, independent testers can accurately measure how many times a meter pulses, but without military-grade — and cost-prohibitive — equipment, it’s difficult to measure the intensity of the strongest bursts.

Furthermore, because SmartMeters pulse and most other radio-frequency emitters remain low and constant like a cellphone, it’s still unclear how they might affect human health. Although the World Health Organization maintains there are no consistent studies showing adverse health affects from radio-frequency exposure, there is plenty of research that suggest long-term exposure is linked to cancer and other diseases.

In short, PG&E’s rapid deployment of SmartMeters appears to be something of a leap of faith, a “trust us” moment — not unlike the promises made over the years by plastics manufacturers who claimed the chemicals they used were safe, too.